# How to enable Port Tunneling and Why

## What is port tunneling good for

Port tunneling is the ability to tunnel from your internet point for presence back to SDF servers and use the SDF servers like a Socks 4 Proxy. This allows your connection to be encrypted via SSL between your internet access point and SDF. This allows your traffic to be more secure if you are on a public internet access point

## What tools are needed

- A good SSH Client that allows tunneling (PuTTY in my examples)
- Any software package that understands SOCKS 4 (Trillian in my example)
- MetaArpa membership

## How to set up PuTTY

First you need to connect to a SSL enabled SDF server: otaku.freeshell.org on port 443.
Then you need to configure the port to tunnel on your local machine. Generally Socks proxies use port 1080 so that is a good port. Click on the Tunnels category and configure the tunnel as shown below.
Click on the "Save" button and you should see the screen as listed below.
Then go back to session and name and save the session. Click connect and the tunnel should become active.

## How to use the Tunnel you just enabled

I am now going to configure Trillian (A great multi IM chat program) to use the Tunnel. It should be obvious how to configure other applications from these screenshots.
First click on the "Trillian Prefernces" and select "Advanced Preferences". Select "Proxy" If you want all your chat services to use the proxy select use one setting for all services checkbox. Otherwise configure this on each service you want to encrypt over the tunnel.
Click on "Close". Now your service should be able to connect through the tunnel. Again this will encryte all traffic from your Internet Access Point to SDF. Once it leaves SDF it will no longer be encrypted (Unless you are hitting a HTTPS page or something already encrytped).
Technically any program that supports a Socks 4 proxy can be used with the tunnel.

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